


let love be the water

by strawb3rryshake



Category: Spartacus Series (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Gay Relationship, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:15:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26210242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strawb3rryshake/pseuds/strawb3rryshake
Summary: "He thinks of Pietros, of his sweet face and the upturn of his nose and the tiny curls like perfect corkscrews that hide at the nape of his neck. A vision of Pietros is before him now, clucking his tongue like he does when the birds sulk. You fool, he says as he takes a knee in front of Barca and cradles his face in tender hands, again you leave without words."—Barca lives, but just barely.
Relationships: Barca/Pietros
Comments: 18
Kudos: 30





	1. Primis

The magistrate’s messenger arrives the moment Barca is run through.

Batiatus, eyes wild, flies to meet him at the doorway, to keep his feet from water already thick with blood. Barca moves only in attempt to staunch oozing wound and nothing else. In this moment, he still draws breath. The next, Batiatus will decide.

He thinks of Pietros, of his sweet face and the upturn of his nose and the tiny curls like perfect corkscrews that hide at the nape of his neck. A vision of Pietros is before him now, clucking his tongue like he does when the birds sulk. _You fool_ , he says as he takes a knee in front of Barca and cradles his face in tender hands, _again you leave without words._

“Ashur!”

Batiatus’ voice echoes in the splash of his footsteps and his face is grotesque with rage. “Fall from fucking sight, Syrian snake. I will share words with you at later time.”

Ashur’s jaw is set and his face flushed but he does not look to Barca before his retreat into the shadows. The guards have hands on their weapons but do not make path towards him except in Batiatus’ wake. After great effort, the Dominus’ eyes fall to Barca but he is frozen, mouth contorting in his struggle to shape the choicest words. “The Magistrate’s messenger has lent veracity to your claim,” he admits with painful reluctance, “but your violence this night must not be rewarded. You are for the pits.”

He turns to leave but takes a moment to spit out a promise. “Speak of this and I will see you dead by my own hand.”

The water ebbs and swells in his path long after he has left the room, buoyed by fat droplets of Spartacus’ rain. Again, the guards have followed him and Barca is left alone, kneeling in the pool like a sacrifice to a god he does not know.

—

A villa slave finds him that same night, an Egyptian called Niobe. She sees him bowed and lifeless, blood and water running off him in rivers and thoughtlessly reaches out to touch. His lunge would not be fast enough to save him in the arena but it is of a speed to catch her off-guard.

“ _Doctore_ ,” he manages to grunt after many strangled attempts. Niobe knows the man of whom he speaks, takes small pleasure in the sight of him as he is one of few in house Batiatus whose skin is as dark as hers.

“I will find him,” she says, and the trembling of her form is not reflected in her tone. She knows she should seek Naevia but the man’s teeth are dark with blood and the hand that grips her is clammy and pale. Time is not on either of their sides and Doctore she must fetch herself.

Before she goes, she tries her best to lean the man against a column, for though his grasp was fearsome it belied intent. He clung to her like weak-legged child to its mother and she would not see him fall to face and drown before her return. “I will find him,” she repeats, “and may it please the gods to see my swift return.”

—

Niobe has never been to the ludus, and she can feel many eyes upon her. Villa slaves were rarely known to venture outside their domain but the new champion of Capua has brought rain, and glory, and the uncorking of Batiatus’ sweetest wines, and as such the business of slaves is far from mind. Moreover, Niobe has never been much noticed by anyone and can slip in and out of dark corners like a house cat. The skill serves her well and she thanks the secret gods of her foremothers for she finds the man soon, seated alone at table and nursing a cup that remained nearly full.

“Doctore!”

The way his brow begins to wrinkle rushes her words. His reputation as a man of tradition is admirable to her but she cannot suffer any long line of questioning. “There is a man, with the braids of a Carthaginian, dying in the villa. He asks for you and I come to beg your presence but please, there is little time.”

_The Beast of Carthage,_ she realizes suddenly, for Doctore is on his feet and his drink on the floor before she has finished her sentence. “Barca,” he hisses more to himself than to her, “I knew not they called for his service this night.”

With great ease he outpaces her and she is stumbling to keep up as he bounds across the sands of the ludus. The moon is full and luminous, putting his face in sharp relief, and the furrow of his brow is twice as deep as when she first approached him. Though she has never known gladiator of his legacy to show fear she thinks it might still be in him, hiding as slaves do in the shadows of the house.

Those they pass in the quiet of the night take little notice of them. Niobe can still feel stray gaze of men upon her but knows none would chance it, given her company. The girl they come upon at the ludus gates was not so lucky. She is caught, tired-eye and panting, on Roman cock, graying helmet with scarlet plume still on the head of the man fucking her.

He spares them but a glance as they walk. Niobe sees how quickly his eyes float over her and is thankful but when they fall to Doctore he startles them all by dropping the woman from his grasp and turning sharply to face them.

“Doctore,” he barks, pulling his tunic down to cover his cock, “Batiatus sends his summons.”

There is a challenge in his voice. With chest puffed out and shoulders thrown back, he dares Doctore to reprimand his straying from errand. Niobe has heard talk of the godhood of gladiators and she sees it now. This guard is a lesser man in every way, his station his only weapon.

It is an unneeded one. Doctore’s expression is as blank as the best of house slaves and Niobe wonders if, in his youth, he had choice between villa and ludus. “I would heed my Dominus’ command,” he says with low voice and waits for the guard to set pace in front of them. For Barca’s sake, Niobe hopes it is a quick one.

—

He has not moved from where he was lain. Niobe notices this as they come into the room and is overcome with dread. They have come too late. If Doctore shares this fear he does not let it paralyze him, striding forward into water overfed and foaming with rain. Under the guard’s silent watch, he kneels over the man’s prone form and puts an ear to his chest, a hand in front of his mouth. Five, ten, fifteen seconds pass—Niobe counts them—before he removes his hand and straightens the line of his back.

“He yet lives?”

Doctore does not turn to face them. Instead he slides an arm underneath the man’s knees and loops the other around his shoulders, takes a great breath, and picks him up like a child. It was a feat of great strength, for the gladiator is thick with muscle and taller than anyone, Roman or slave, Niobe has seen.

“He does.”

“And he has greatly dishonored the house of Batiatus this night.”

Niobe can see it in his eyes—the guard is nervous at the display and his words ring loudly among the columns. “He is to the pits, after treatment and recuperation. You will see him to medicus and speak nothing of it, except on Dominus’ command.”

A bowed head from Doctore is all he receives as affirmation but it proves enough, for the guard returns it, turns on his heel and leaves the room. Doctore, his arms straining under gladiator’s weight, keeps his eyes at the guard’s back until he can no longer be seen, then looks to Niobe.

“I would have this pool cleaned, and the floors washed of blood. See it done.”

It is now her turn to bow head. “Yes, Doctore.”

She maintains her position until he too has gone from sight. In their absence the pool has turned pink as Domina’s rouge and she can see blood dried in a spray across several columns.

Her night will be long.


	2. Secundus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: referenced child death

Barca wakes to a hand at his face, but it is of differing size and temperature to Pietros’ so he does not lean into it. The ache of wounds forgotten in sleep is rapidly returning though he has yet no memory of a fight that may have caused them.

“Barca. You return to the living.”

It is a great task to open his eyes but at the hearing of that voice he does so. “Doctore,” he answers and it comes out as a groan. The man looks down on him with a face like a mask, his hand heavy at Barca’s jaw.

He cannot yet see the blood, but he can smell it in the air. There are only three places he knows that boast the same fragrance; this is neither pit nor arena so he must be under medicus’ care. He can feel the press of bandage and the pull of suture in many places but he seems in possession of all his limbs. It is not until he attempts to sit up and is frozen in agony that he remembers both the swords that pierced and how they came to pierce him.

“I am a dead man,” he tells Doctore, who has moved hand from head to shoulder in an effort to keep him still. The man does not smile but something like a laugh escapes his lips.

“Though you yet live. A mercy for which you must thank your dominus and his house slave.”

Barca remembers the girl but faintly. She had a face too noble for a slave, he thinks, a face like the Numidian women who rode through Carthage on camels heavy with gold. 

“I will offer prayers for both of them,” he promises, and it’s partly true. He will pray for the girl in the cool of the morning when he prays for his mother and sisters, Cyprian, and Auctus; he will think of her during the prayer of protection he sings every sunrise over the sleeping body of Pietros.

_Pietros_.

Barca’s breath catches in his chest and from the urgency in his face Doctore predicts words yet unspoken. “Pietros remains in your cell. I have told Tychos to pass message of your injury and delay and to keep a watchful eye.”

“I would see him,” Barca insists, though fear and bile rise in him at the thought of facing Pietros in such state. He would not have him anxious over events in which he had no part.

There is compassion in the quiet way Doctore shakes his head but a warning in the tightening of his grip. “Barca,” he murmurs and the pressure of his hand is quickly becoming painful, “it may be better if you did not.”

At heart, Barca knows this. Crixus’ injury has kept him his place as second best in the ludus but now his wounds are almost as great as the Gaul’s and Pietros does not have the protection of Domina and the house as Naevia does. If his status lies in jeopardy, Pietros' safety is forfeit and he would not be the bearer of this news.

Choice in the matter is taken from him almost instantly. Light floods in from the corridor as the door to medicus’ chambers is thrown open and Pietros himself hurtles through it. Two steps into the room and he has spotted Doctore; he freezes like cat in face of dog, tensed and ready to trade blows. 

There had always been a feline quality about him that Barca greatly admired, as he saw the same in himself. It was in the like ways they held the birds, acutely aware of rushing blood and puffing lungs hidden in feathered bodies. Barca remembered a night when Pietros had brought one to bed with them, held it to Barca’s ear and waited until meaning had made itself plain.

_It has a heart_ , he had said reverently, _can you hear the beating of it?_

He would hear Pietros’ heart now, tell him the memory of its sound kept his own heart beating as he lay dying in Batiatus’ pool. Doctore had moved in effort to conceal the worst evidence of this from Pietros’ view but he could not hide everything and something akin to sob falls from the man’s mouth.

“ _Barca_.”

Name spoken barely above whisper for Pietros has gone sallow with shock. Barca, in his delirium, is struck by another vision, of Pietros standing like a column at the edge of the Carthiginian sea. At his feet there is a sword and on his hip a babe with the same brown skin and soft halo of hair. _Stay your errands_ , he says and he is smiling, _you have been too long from my arms._

A fantasy. Not so hours ago, when he had been certain of their release, of coming to bed Pietros in a cage for the last time and waking next morning to an open door, but now he must tell the boy that hope of freedom has been dashed and Dominus plans to set the pits awash with his blood. Perhaps death in the waters of the villa had been better path. 

There is again a hand on his face and it is a familiar one. Pietros has come to his side. “My love,” he coos, his eyes wet, “my love, your wounds are so great.”

Barca should chastise him, remind him how dangerous it was to use such tenderness in plain view of others, yet _place head on chest and see greatest wound healed_ , is what he murmurs in its stead, for it is true and now may be the time for hearing it.

Doctore fixes him with furious gaze. He has moved to close the door as protection from prying eyes and speaks in a hiss. “Do not indulge his desires, Pietros. I know Dominus will have a time at which he would set him to purpose and I would have him in superior condition upon its arrival.”

At these words, Pietros is lost and he speaks without thinking. “Purpose? What purpose?” he demands, eyes flickering between the two of them. Doctore says nothing but Barca has decided he is done with lying.

“I am for the pits.”

Pietros’ gasp is mirrored in Doctore’s heavy sigh and he refuses glance at either of them as he steps into the corridor.

“Breathe word of that to anyone and he will not live long enough to see them.”

The door swings shut and he is gone. Barca is left to be gazed at by Pietros, whose anguish is slowly giving way to disbelief. “Barca,” he says and his voice is stiff and peculiar, “Barca, you have held Dominus’ favor since before I came to this ludus and you ask me to believe he is sending his right arm to fight in the pits like a slave?”

Why Pietros would think this thing, above all other things, a lie Barca does not know. Until he realizes that this is also Batiatus’ doing, as it was Pietros who’d assured the Dominus that Barca did not kill the child—would never have killed the child—for Barca is loyal to the house and has a great affection for delicate things.

Truth must out.

“I killed the boy.”


	3. Tertium

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: referenced child death.

_I killed the boy._

He says it because he does not want Pietros to ask, because he may not last the night and if he does he will face death in the pit every night after, and if Pietros was to turn from him he would know now.

Pietros does not speak for a length and Barca is loath to look at him. He has not yet moved to leave but Barca takes no comfort in this as he knows not where Pietros would think to go.

“Dominus was worried you had gone too far,” he says, finally, in rawest voice, “and I assured him you had not, for the spilling of innocent blood is not in your nature.”

And when Barca tilts his head to meet Pietros eye to eye he sees in his face and in the shaking of his hands that he is afraid. Or maybe he is repulsed. The flickering of the single torch Doctore had lit leaves half his face in harsh shadow and his expression seems to shift with the light.

“Was I wrong?”

Barca does not know. Thinks: maybe he was. He had not begun this life as a slayer of innocents yet he had been long in this ludus. Taken many lives for the sport of it, but not for the pleasure, though he is unsure how much difference that makes.

“Pietros—” he begins but cannot continue. There is a great ache blossoming in his head, watered by the pounding of Spartacus’s rain.

“Was I wrong, Barca?”

Pietros asks again, as if Barca had not heard him. His shaking is not from fear. Barca takes a breath, closes his eyes to the light.

“I killed the boy on Dominus’ command.”

Pietros does not believe him. It is clear in his voice. “His command was to let the boy live.”

“A lie.”

“He has told me himself!”

He is desperate; his voice trembles. Barca cannot open his eyes to him, hates when he begs like this. “He lies, Pietros.”

Tears come freely down Pietros’ cheeks. His eyes are dark in the torchlight. The urge to take him in arms is strong and Barca curses every wound that prevents him doing so. Curses Batiatus in tandem and too loudly for Pietros shudders, sucks in a sudden breath. With great effort, he opens his mouth to speak and it is almost too quiet for the hearing.

“Why would he do such a thing?”

It is the second time this night that Barca is faced with his own cowardice. The truth he told to Pietros was a half-made thing, the sharpest parts of it pruned back and hidden, and if Pietros had not been not so overcome he would have seen this. Yet in his anguish it had escaped him and Barca was glad for it. He may still be forgiven for the child, as he was forgiven for every man whose blood he wore dripping out of the arena, but the lie.

Barca could beg too, if it came to that.

“I had done the same to you.”

The room falls into quiet. Not even the sound of breath fills it. Pietros is frozen at his side. Barca watches the muscles of his mouth twitch and undulate, hears the dull grinding of his teeth.

“You lied to me.”

He is stunned by the possibility, looks at Barca as if he is seeing him for the first time and Barca cannot take it. Would rather die upon this stone table than be gazed upon as Pietros is gazing up on him now. “Batiatus’ command was always to kill the boy. He deceived you with aim to expose my disloyalty when he heard that I had not.”

Pietros chokes on his name, spasms through its meagre syllables. “Barca—”

“On my mother’s life,” Barca declares, “I swear it.” 

Again, Pietros is stunned. Barca has talked of his mother only once. On the most acrid and hottest night of the drought he had wept for her, his face hidden in the sacred space of Pietros’ neck. Neither of them had spoken of it since.

“You lied to me.” Pietros repeats. He is looking still at Barca but his gaze is vacant and his thoughts are somewhere else. Barca can do nothing but nod, and barely that.

“I did.”

Another silence stretches between them. Barca’s head is throbbing, eyes dry and tight in thundering skull. An equal tightness is settling into Pietros’ face, his shoulders. At his sides his hands are still twitching. Anger, Barca realizes. He is angry.

“Why would you do this?”

It is the simplest question he’s asked this night and Barca gives him his answer easily. “Your heart is precious to me, Pietros. I would not see it bruised or burdened.”

“Yet you would let it lead you to your death?” Pietros hisses; suddenly he is impotent with rage, seething with it, “I am not a child, Barca, and would not be treated as one!”

“Pietros—”

He is ignored. Pietros is nearly vibrating in the magnitude of his emotion. “You think I do not know of your actions in the arena? You think I do not know why they call you the Beast of Carthage?”

“You know nothing of the Beast of Carthage,” Barca mutters, because he does not. What can he know of beasts, this sapling of a man with belly still soft and skin unscarred?

Pietros laughs at him. “I know nothing of the—then please, tell me whose cock is in me every fucking night, if not the Beast of fucking Carthage!”

A low blow. Barca stutters. “I am not—I do not—”

Pietros laughs again, sharp and cruel. “What? You think yourself a different man when returned to ludus? You forget the nights you came to me reeking of blood, covered in it?”

His voice echoes, in the chamber and in the hammering of Barca’s head. He can barely hear himself. “Would you lower fucking voice—”

“Lower fucking voice?” and gods, he is spitting mad, “of what are you afraid, Barca? That Batiatus will sending you crawling into the pits, to be cut down by any man able to grasp sword and swing it?”

This, Barca thinks, is something Crixus would say. Crixus, who is somewhere in the recesses of this room, laying as though dead. The thought curls in his gut, leadens it. He lets his eyes close, lets the breath run out of his chest. “Pietros, please.”

(He will not think of the last time he had pleaded with Pietros. How the night was dark enough and the halls of the ludus empty enough that he had let Pietros crawl between his legs and fuck him, let him pant and coo in his ear, his hair tickling the skin of Barca’s forehead.)

It is too much. He opens his eyes. Pietros is looking down at him in exhaustion, the light making great hollows of his eyes. He looks as a corpse, mouth thin and drawn.

“I am a fool,” he says, “even now you could snap my neck like a bird’s, I should not tempt you.”

Barca wants to vomit. He wants to rise up, to shake Pietros until that thought came out of his head. “I would never. Pietros, do you hear me, I would _never_.”

Some facsimile of a smile spreads across Pietros’ face but it is bitter. “You would never kill a child and yet not two days ago you have done so.”

The boy. In his mind’s eye, Barca can see the color of his hair. Remembers how it felt as he had brushed it back from his face. Remembers how clean it had smelled. He had wept into that hair, as soft and as fine as new straw. Had prayed over the body before he left.

“I would do it again,” he murmurs; he cannot find it in himself to be ashamed, “I would do it now to buy freedom from this fucking villa.”

A gasp, let out before Pietros can catch it, turns quickly into a sob. He must have forgotten, Barca thinks, forgotten everything about the glorious beginning of the night. How the rain came down in a wave upon them in the mess hall, how he had licked the first tastes of freedom from Barca’s mouth and thrown his head back in exaltation. The memory seems ages old, plucked from another lifetime.

“I thought we might return to Carthage.”

Barca blinks. “What?”

Trembling, Pietros pulls himself up to sit at Barca’s knees, balancing on the edge of the stone. There is not much space and Barca cannot move himself to make more. “You asked me once, where I would have us go,” he murmurs, “I thought you might take me to Carthage.”

Barca cannot help the bark of his laugh. “There is no Carthage. Rome set it aflame and pissed on the ashes long before I was born.”

“Is there nothing of it left?”

There is curiosity in Pietros' voice, a quirk in his brow. For a moment, Barca can pretend that this a night like any other: Pietros curled into his side, plying him with questions about his homeland and what little he remembered of being a free man. When the night was viscous and dark and the birds had gone quiet Barca would indulge him, as he does now. “If there is, it is sat upon by a colony of Roman fucks. Farmers so poor they could barely buy a slave in Rome so some quaestor sends them to feast on the corpse of my city.”

At the pitying look in Pietros’ eyes he stops. “Apologies. You speak of hope and I answer you with bitterness. There is one thing that remains,” he continues, softer “the first thing I loved aside from my mother.”

Pietros bites at his lip. Barca has told him much of his life, enough to make a guess at that of which he speaks. “You cannot speak of Cyprian?”

A fair attempt. Barca grins. “I speak of the sea.”

Pietros looks as if he doesn’t know what to say, mouth loose and embarrassed. “I have never seen it.”

“No?”

“Never.”

Barca frowns. He knew that Pietros was born a slave but the thought of him kept so deep inland, for all his tenuous life, was an unpleasant one. “I would take you there. The sight of it is like nothing I can describe.”

“Would you try?” Pietros asks. Barca huffs a quiet laugh, feels it pull at the flesh over his ribs.

“For you I would do anything.”

Pietros’ hand is warm and gentle as it comes to rest on Barca’s thigh. He is smiling. “Then tell me about the sea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> apologies for the wait ! final chapter should be up in a week x


	4. Quartus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you guys. oh, you guys. i am so humbled by all of your kind words. i got into spartacus a literal decade after its release so to be on the end of this love is a million times beyond my wildest expectations. it is with my most profuse apologies that i give you the final chapter of this fic. thank y’all for being here (and being so patient) xx

They sit in precarious balance, the two of them. Through great effort, Barca has spread his legs enough for Pietros to sit between them, tent his knees over Barca’s calf and wedge his heels at the end of the stone table. One hand is propped behind him, the other lying delicately on the unmarred stretch of Barca’s side. Slowly, painstakingly, Barca shifts a hand of his own to rest atop it.

“Think of the widest field you have seen,” he begins, looks up at Pietros with a sharp eye, “You have seen a field, yes?”

Pietros stares at him for too long before he recognizes the joke. There is no smile, but an upward twitch of his lips satisfies Barca well enough.

“I have.”

Barca nods, offers Pietros the smile he could not give. “Good. Now let it multiply in size until it fills your vision.”

He watches Pietros’ eyes flutter closed and his smile widens. “Fill that space with water—not the filthy shit we drink but blue, bluer than any sky or fabric you’ve seen.” 

“Bluer than the eyes of Spartacus?” Pietros asks him. His thumb draws careful circles round one of Barca’s many, spidery scars. Outside, the Thracian’s rain continues with a tenacity that is nearing spiteful. Barca wonders if the man intended to flood the ludus and drown them all.

“Do you spend much time looking into the eyes of Spartacus?” he prompts, capturing Pietros’ thumb under his palm and stilling it with a squeeze. It’s a poor joke. Barca knows this, but he has had enough of heavy things, of the dull weight that has settled in the slump of Pietros’ shoulders.

It seems heavier now, as Pietros curls his fingers beneath the waist of Barca’s subligaculum to stroke the tender skin there. “He is kind, Barca,” he murmurs, “there are not many kind men here.”

He is right. Doctore is compassionate enough but he is no childminder. It is Spartacus who has kept his watchful eye on Pietros, even when there was no need, and Barca prays that he will continue. There is no one else.

“Do you miss it?’” Pietros voice comes sudden and soft. Barca blinks up at him.

“Miss what?”

Pietros’ hand moves to wrap more fully around the cut of his hip and he looks down on Barca with eyes as black as the night sky. “Carthage and its sea.”

“Yes,” Barca admits in a whisper, “I dream of it.”

He hesitates before continuing, voice almost as a quiet as a thought, “I have dreamt of taking you there many times.”

At his hip, Pietros’ hand has stilled, the cool pressure of it a welcome counterpoint to the feverish throb of his injuries. “Did I like it?”

Barca wonders of Pietros’ vision of the sea in its vastness, of how it would pale or loom in the face of the thing itself. Thinks of the Pietros of his visions, how he looked on the sea the way Barca looked on it, this great and terrible bridge between Rome and his homeland, which was the same way Barca looked on Pietros. Lovingly. In quiet terror and in awe.

“You did.”

Pietros nods with a sense of finality. “Then we shall see it. Someday.” 

Easy for him to say. Barca does not want to fall back into bitterness but it is hard in the face of night’s events. Batiatus’ face, distorted in shame and anger, comes unbidden into his mind and he blows a sharp breath to keep himself from spitting. “I would have to kill a thousand men to make it so.”

“Then you will,” and Pietros states this like it has already come to pass, “Barca, I will not see you die in the pits.”

He is so earnest. For the first time, perhaps, Barca is privy to the true scope of his naiveté, his optimism: the great markers of youth still alive and prosperous after a lifetime of slavery. It sickens him, against his will and better judgement.

“You may see me die on this table,” he mutters, and his tone must be harsh for in his lap, Pietros tenses.

“Speak not of such things,” he gasps, indignant, “lest your gods hear you!”

Barca swallows a sour laugh, curls the fingers of his free hand into hidden fist. He looks away from Pietros’ incense, into the hot flame of the torch. “My gods are not listening.”

A low hiss. “ _You cannot say that_.”

Pietros is disturbed. As he should be, when Barca has just thumbed his nose at the deities of his mother and hers before her, but he cannot regret it. He had prayed as he lay prone in Batiatus’ courtyard, used his last cogent thought to beg Eshmun to heal him, Iškur to come to him in the rain. And for all his pleading, it was an Egyptian slave who had come to his aid. He shakes his head.

“I speak only the truth,” he tells Pietros, “I pray to them daily and hear nothing in response.”

Some understanding makes itself known on Pietros’ face. “Perhaps,” he hums, “it is you who are not listening.”

He has removed his hand from Barca’s hip and extends it to caress Barca’s cheek. The muscle of Barca’s jaw clenches and jumps; Pietros soothes it with the pad of his finger. “I cannot listen to nothing,” Barca protests through gritted teeth, “they have washed their hands of me.”

Pietros is undeterred. “Then I will intercede on your behalf. To whom should I pray?”

“Batiatus,” Barca says with a laugh, “The master of the pit. Whatever god can strike down an enemy or heal a dying man. The Romans have plenty, you may take your pick.”

He knows he has gone too far when Pietros takes his shoulder in a grip, not tight enough to hurt but enough to make his displeasure known. His eyes, when Barca deigns to meet them, are deeply sad. “Barca, enough,” he says thickly, “I beg you. Do not deny me this.”

There is a beat of silence. Barca lets all his focus be drawn to the pressure of Pietros palm at his chest and then releases it.

“Tanit,” he mumbles, “you can pray to Tanit. I have already given her a child so perhaps she will lend you her ear.”

At this, Pietros shivers. “She takes children?”

Barca shrugs. “Sometimes. Sometimes, goats are enough.”

He heaves a great sigh. Again, he lifts his hand to rest over Pietros’. “Do not burden yourself, Pietros. It is Fate who decides if I live or die and she will not hear prayers.”

Pietros’ mouth snaps shut. Abruptly, he looks away, though there is nothing in the room to catch his attention.

“Do you hear it?” he remarks almost blithely, “Spartacus’ rain continues.”

Barca has heard enough of it and rolls his eyes. “I almost drowned in it.”

“Barca, enough,” and Pietros’ voice rises in the way he only allows with Barca and the younger ludus slaves, “you speak like a man doomed and you are not. A doomed man would be lying dead in Batiatus’ pool and I, alone and unknowing, in the halls of the ludus, but you, you live.”

“Tonight.”

“And tomorrow also,” Pietros insists, and suddenly cracks a wry smile, “Though you should rest. I would not talk you to death.”

The laugh this earns him is the first honest laugh Barca has allowed this night and it feeds Pietros grin. He is shuffling across the stone, in what Barca firstly judges as an attempt to dismount but recognizes quickly as an attempt to better situate himself between Barca’s legs.

“Pietros…” Barca warns and he is a given a sharp pinch as reward.

“I will not leave you,” Pietros whispers into the juncture of hip and thigh where he has chosen to lay his head. The softness of his hair is a welcome tickle. Any night but this it might’ve led to a cocksucking, a warm and languorous fuck, though Barca is not brave enough to hope for such things again.

“You would sleep here,” he snorts, “Among the sick and the dead.”

There’s a soft hum. Pietros lays a dry kiss where Barca’s skin is thin and most sensitive. “Fitting,” he muses, “as I am dead without you.” 

What to say to that, Barca does not know. He instead lets his hand come to rest in the forest of Pietros’ curls, weaves his fingers into it, rubs rhythmically at the scalp. It does not take long for Pietros’ breathing to even and slow. Sleep is not far from him, nor is it from Barca himself. He should say a final piece.

“Tomorrow,” he begins, and Pietros makes a contented noise.

“Tell me then.”

“Pietros—”

“Sleep, Barca.”

It is a command; Barca follows it. And in his dream, he lies with Pietros in bed, in a forgotten Carthage, with the spring rain coming in torrents and the sprawl of the sea in full view to the east, pockmarked with raindrops and shining like a thousand precious gems.

**Author's Note:**

> “Let love be the water/I pour into you and you pour into me/there ain’t no drought here”
> 
> Beyoncé, Bigger
> 
> “I think of you all the time and therefore have little to say that would not embarrass you, for instance my first feeling about the rain was that it was like you.”
> 
> John Cage


End file.
